Test-Sequence Generation with Hol-TestGen with an Application to Firewall Testing

Abstract

hol-TestGen is a specification and test case generation environment extending the interactive theorem prover Isabelle/hol. Its method is two-staged: first, the original formula is partitioned into test cases by transformation into a normal form called test theorem. Second, the test cases are analyzed for ground instances (the test data) satisfying the constraints of the test cases. Particular emphasis is put on the control of explicit test hypotheses which can be proven over concrete programs.

Although originally designed for black-box unit-tests, hol-TestGen’s underlying logic and deduction engine is powerful enough to be used in test-sequence generation, too.

We develop the theory for test-sequence generation with hol-TestGen and describe its use in a substantial case-study in the field of computer security, namely the black-box test of configured firewalls.